This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the ...

Here the philosopher and physicist David Z Albert argues, among other things, that the difference between past and future can be understood as a mechanical phenomenon of nature and that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to present the entirety of what can be said about the world as a narrative of “befores” and “afters.”.

Presents a guide to the basics of quantum mechanics and measurement.

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can (...) just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)

From the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience, a hugely influential book that challenged key assertions by Niels Bohr and other founders of quantum mechanics, A Guess at the Riddle provides a major metaphysical overhaul of one of physics' most intractable problems-the quest to bridge quantum and classical physics in order to understand the nature of reality.

It is argued that certain recent advances in the construction of a theory of the collapses of Quantum Mechanical wave functions suggest the possibility of new and improved foundations for statistical mechanics, foundations in which epistemic considerations play no role.

I distinguish between two conceptually different kinds of physical space: a space of ordinary material bodies, which is the space of points at which I could imaginably place the tip of my finger, or the center of a billiard-ball, and a space of elementary physical determinables, which is the smallest space of points such that stipulating what is happening at each one of those points, at every time, amounts to an exhaustive physical history of the universe. In all classical physical (...) theories, these two spaces happen to coincide – and what we mean by calling a theory “classical”, and all we mean by calling a theory “classical”, is precisely that these two spaces coincide. But once the distinction between these two spaces in on the table, it becomes clear that there is no logical or conceptual reason why they must coincide – and it turns out that a very simple way of pulling them apart from one another gives us quantum mechanics. (shrink)

A Quantum-Mechanical automation, equipped with mechanisms for the measurement and the recording and the prediction of certain physical properties of the world, is described. It is inquired what sort of empirical description such an automation would produce of itself. It turns out that this description would be a very novel one, one such as was never imagined in the conventional discussions of measurement.

A many-worlds interpretation is of quantum mechanics tells us that the linear equations of motion are the true and complete laws for the time-evolution of every physical system and that the usual quantum-mechanical states provide complete descriptions of all possible physical situations. Such an interpretation, however, denies the standard way of understanding quantum-mechanical states. When the pointer on a measuring device is in a superposition of pointing many different directions, for example, we are to understand this as many pointers, each (...) in a differentworld, each pointing in a different determinate direction. We ask here whether such talk makes any genuinely intelligible sense of the term world. We conclude that it does not. (shrink)

On April 1, 2016, at the Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, a book symposium, organized by Alyssa Ney, was held in honor of David Albert’s After Physics. All participants agreed that it was a valuable and enlightening session. We have decided that it would be useful, for those who weren’t present, to make our remarks publicly available. Please bear in mind that what follows are remarks prepared for the session, and that on some points (...) participants may have changed their minds in light of the ensuing discussion. (shrink)

It is inquired how much an observer can ascertain of the quantum state of a system of which he and his measuring apparatus form a part; how much, for example, observers like ourselves can ascertain of the quantum state of the Universe. It turns out that no practicable experiment (and: perhaps, no experiment whatever) can establish that that state is not the vacuum. Some of the implications of this curious result are discussed.